The voices of teachers and students are taken into account far too infrequently when determining how effective the time spent on drilling, pretesting, and  taking standardized tests has been to “improve” our public school systems or the experiences of children growing up in them.  

Far more frequently the general public is fed  agenda-laden opinions of businesspeople and corporations instead. They sell us a side of the story in which our schools are failing, where schools are blamed for economic conditions when they are bad- but do not receive credit when the economy clicks along seamlessly.  

I fear that currently our children are subject to too rote work and teaching to the tests because of the pressure to achieve on state mandated tests or face loss of funds, public labeling, and bad press. Our schools are being consumed by these tests under NCLB because of bad policies becoming popular. Why did backwards policies come to power and why do they stay the "norm"? Because they were sold to the public in the prettiest packaging money could buy.

Big business backs politicians and drives legislation. Corporations have an agenda to privatize public schools to get their hands on big chunks of district $$.  It is no wonder many of us have never noticed this before, because these exact types of people-businessmen and lawyers- are the individuals in society who make their living by “selling” their side of the story- they are the master spin doctors, and they have a stake in making public schools look bad to further their agendas of doing away with teachers unions and privatizing education.  

Corporate businessmen and lawyers come up with buzzwords like "tougher standards" and "back to basics" that sound awesome on the surface and appeal to people’s nostalgia about values and traditions. Unfortunately, catch phrases like this are often wolves in sheep's clothing that conceal huge government mandates manipulated and defined by a dominant elite who simply want to get their hands on power and money, keep the status quo in check, and back their opinions up with numbers. 
 “Accountability” sounds like a good idea at face value, for example. The trouble comes in when the term needs to be defined with specifics as to WHO is to be held accountable, for doing WHAT, exactly, and where is the money supposed to come from?  
If we look at the list of "failing" schools under NCLB's high stakes tests, it reads as a better indicator of the incomes of the parents in town than anything else.  As the dominant elite would expect, so the numbers back it up- rich white neighborhood perform the best, and people of color and the poor are concentrated in areas where test scores are low. Are the poor simply stupid and lazy? (I sure hope not!) Another alternative is that the tests aren't testing that they are supposed to, but are biased in favor of of a rich predominantly white dominant elite.

   Right now I am reading The Schools Our Children Deserve by Alfie Kohn. Todays' chapter is ‘Getting Teaching and Learning Wrong- Traditional Education and Its Victims.’ It was news to me to think of traditional education as getting learning wrong, because we hear so much in the news about the call for tougher standards and getting back to basics. It is however interesting to look more closely and investigate what people mean when they use these buzz word catch phrases, and what the underlying assumptions are about the real kids in our communities. 

                              At face value, phrasing such as "All students will demonstrate the ability to..." simply seemed to start a lesson off with a well-defined and measurable goal to reach for. What I did not see was that, from another angle Kohn presents, by dictating what every student must be able to do by the end of (e.g.) 2nd grade, many children who do not learn as quickly as others risk being labeled “failures” because they developed at a different rate. As teachers, we all know that our students develop at different rates and that it would be ludicrous to label them as failures for not progressing all at the same time like a lot of machines- however this one-size-fits-all kind of thinking that has come down from on high with NCLB, for example, is putting the pressure on to conform diverse communities to a cookie cutter model of excellence that is more a measure of parental income than of student aptitude.

               It pays to look at both sides of the story and to examine ourselves, our teaching and particulars we take for granted in our work each day, to see what my students may be experiencing as they grow up within the changing public school system.  Reading books like Kohn’s help me to develop professionally and also help me not take for granted that the way things are is the best way, or even the way things always have been. That's why reading books like this is so relevant to me- Staying on top of current events in our field helps us become more effective advocates for our students. 
                A quote I enjoyed from this chapter and really agreed with was by Harold Howe II, a former U.S. Commissioner of Education. When asked what public standards should be like, if we adopted them, he said, “They should be as vague as possible.” (Kohn, 48) Now, that’s what I’d call good advice from the past!  The “bunch-o-facts” model that Kohn describes simply shows me these underlying assumptions we have set up about what it means to be an educated person. As we all know, every class is different and there is no convenient panacea solution. It is not long lists of arbitrary specific facts that make someone an educated person, though these make a good candidate for the Jeopardy show. 

                        One final quote I found inspiring by Howard Gardner that I read in the book was, “If we ask our kids what they did in school today- and they reply ‘Nothing’- They are right. They didn’t do anything because traditional schooling is done TO students” (Kohn, 64) My response to this quote is that, yes, if we want to send the message to the future generation of this country “Don’t do something, Just sit there” then we are doing the right thing looking at education as filling empty vessels with facts and extremely particular standards, but is this really the path we ought to continue on with public education? It seems we should be working more to develop the passion for learning and the interest in learning. Overall impression: Rather than being so consumed with the “back to basics” movement, we ought to be concerned with moving forward to meet the new and changing challenges of the future.